Felton Diary: March 24, 2008

[Note: This is the first of probably a plethora of installments around preparations for, and observations about, Lindependence 2008 in Felton.]

This typical Monday started with a flurry of e-mails sent to those I had e-mailed a couple of weeks ago regarding garnering support from various distros and FOSS programs for Lindependence 2008.

I have to confess, I thought support would be more forthcoming from all segments of what is nebulously referred to as the “Linux community” (I would call it the “GNU/Linux community,” but never mind). By Distrowatch.com’s count, there are about 360 distros and a few hundred FOSS software programs, but so far, here is who has responded positively to our request for support.

AntiX.

Mepis.

Wolvix.

OpenOffice.org.

Mandriva.

OpenSUSE and Kubuntu are discussing it and e-mails have been forwarded to whomever need to read them.

But after two weeks, that’s it.

I’m willing to cut wide swatches of slack here. For the most part, unless I actually have corresponded with someone or actually have an e-mail address of someone in authority in a distro or FOSS program, I sent the message to “Contact Us” and asked the recipient to make sure it gets to whomever needs to see it. Whether that actually happened, only the recipient knows.

(Also, there’s the issue of Debian elections, which excuses them from an answer, but not for long.)

So again, it’s back to the e-mails, mentioning again that this is a good opportunity for distros and FOSS programs to make inroads in Central California, and to see which distros and FOSS programs respond to this opportunity.

This event will go on regardless, and it remains to be seen whether people who talk the FOSS talk actually walk the FOSS walk.

Clear and cool in Henry Cowell State Park, and the rest of Felton.

(Larry Cafiero, editor/publisher of Open Source and Free Software Reporter, is an associate member of the Free Software Foundation.)